To bring our first Women in Horror Month Celebration to a close, CineDump is proud to present Andrea Subissati. Now Editor in Chief at Rue Morgue magazine, Subissati’s roots in horror go back to a scholarly origin. While many critics and academics have long maligned horror movies for their violence, sexuality, and the uncomfortable mixing of those two, Subissati looks at how horror movies are often a comment on our world.

When it comes to reputation, horror… well, horror isn’t exactly the class president. When I was a sophomore in high school, my English class was assigned an argumentative essay. I had yet to become the massive horror aficionado that I am today, but, for whatever reason, I chose to argue that horror films had just as much artistic merit and social conscience as “real movies.”

Without Hannah Neurotica, there’d be no Women in Horror Month. That’s not hyperbole, though it may sound like it. The fact of the matter is, though, that the movement can be traced to the efforts of one enterprising young woman in the early days of the 2010s who looked out at a horror landscape dotted with so many female bodies, yet far too many women responsible for putting those bodies there; so it was that Ax Wound Magazine was born, and with it, the entire ethos that would become the Women in Horror Month movement.

In the Creepypasta kingdom, NickyXX reigns supreme. It was a cold January afternoon when I first made her acquaintance, riding shotgun on the road to Dallas, during one of those peculiar Texas winters when the weather shifts from balmy to arctic in the blink of an eye and tropical sunrises give way to gray, frozen dusks. Pennie and I were en route to a business function, and to kill the time during the four-hour slog—made even less interesting than usual by the endless vistas of frozen, grey grass and naked trees—I googled “best Creepypastas of the year.”

Hey, True Detective fans—did the resolution of Season 1 leave you cold? Disappointed in the reveal of the King in Yellow and the non-reveal of the evil cult’s machinations? Upset that you invested that much time into something for so little a payoff?

It’s 9:30 on a Tuesday morning, and I think I’m about to watch Tamae Garateguy die. Her geographic location—Argentina, or, “the end of the world,” as she calls it—precludes my usual phone interview method, so she’s been kind enough to chat with me on Skype about her career and her latest film, Mujer Lobo. It’s midway through our conversation when her doorbell rings.